Books published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd

The first Indian indentured laborers came to the Caribbean more than150 years ago, and their traditional values have had to confront a rapidly changing world in 20th century Trinidad. "Highway in the Sun" tells the story of Tiger and Urmilla's first year of marriage away from their extended family and their struggles relating to their new Afro-Creole neighbors in the suburbs of Port of Spain. In "Home Sweet India," Johnny is dismayed by his loss of culture and threatened by the emergence of Creole nationalism, and plans to return to India. In "Turn Again Tiger," Tiger learns that he must not turn his back on his Indian past. These plays demonstrate the choices Indians in the Caribbean must make between tradition and creolization.

A brave and pioneering treatment of sexual identity in Caribbean literature, this novel, first published in 1960, follows the fortunes of Johnnie Sobert, a Jamaican exile who works in London at a club that caters to black American servicemen. In flight from his dominant, possessive mother, he immerses himself in the bohemian Soho scene and adopts a wisecracking persona as a cover for his deep-seated insecurities. Adding to Johnnie's confusion is the fact that when he is not at work, he navigates a completely different life in Hempstead, where he lives in a bedsitter and carries on an unsatisfying affair with his white landlady, Fiona. These two worlds provide a lively portrait of Britons reacting to the growing presence of blacks and Asians in their neighborhoods, and Johnnie takes lessons from each place. By the time he finally decides to move in with his gay friend, Dick, he is much better equipped with self-awareness--but he has yet to make a decision about where his desires truly lie.

Fans of Loretta Collins's debut poetry book, The Twelve Foot Neon Woman, will not be disappointed with her stunning second collection, set against the natural disasters of Puerto Rico.

This is a moving story of a family's beginnings, growth and, in the context both of time and Trinidadian society, its inevitable dispersal. Savi Naipaul Akal's memoir pays tribute to remarkable parents, so different but equal in importance to their large family. It is an account of family loyalty, sacrifice, and sometimes tensions. Through this focus, the memoir also gives a sharply observed picture of cultural change in Trinidad from colony to independent nation, of being Indian in a Creole society, of the role of education, and her parents' encouragement of herself and her sisters to make independent lives for themselves. The memoir gives an acute analysis of the pressures that led many of the family to emigrate, but also of the good lives made by Savi and her husband that led them to "put down their bucket" and stay. Above all, this memoir offers the pleasure of writing which is elegant and lucid, with a distinctively personal voice.

Offering a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love, and loss, this collection of poems reflects the author's personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage. The poems cross oceans and centuries, traveling from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century. Elsewhere, time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century and another poem, based on childhood memories, places her in 1950's Yorkshire but echoes links with her Sri Lankan heritage.

In 1765, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, a Bengali secretary employed by the East India Company, traveled on a mission to Britain to seek protection for the Mogul emperor Shah Alam II. The mission was aborted by the greed and duplicity of Robert Clive, but it resulted in this remarkable account of the Mirza's travels in Britain and Europe. This is an entertaining, unique, and culturally valuable document of those journeys.

When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

This novel that echoes the styles of Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul follows a young Guyanese engineer appointed to help save and shore up a Kent coastal village's sea defenses, and his relationship with the old woman with whom he lodges. Learning more about the village's history through his relationship with Mrs. Rutherford, the narrator discovers that underlying the village's Englishness is a latent violence that echoes the imperial past, forcing him to not only reconsider his perceptions of himself and his native Guyana, but also to examine the connection between land and memory.

After 20-year-old Thomas Inkle is left the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the West Indies, he is rescued by Yarico, a Carib woman who takes him as her lover. Their erotic encounter, which has a profound effect on both, is explored with poetic, imaginative intensity. Amongst the Caribs, Inkle is a mere child whose survival depends entirely on Yarico's favor and protection. When he is rescued and taken with Yarico to the slave island of Barbados, however, she is entirely at his mercy. Loosely based on a popular narrative in the 17th and 18th centuries, this version of the tale's mythic dimensions are reinterpreted from both a female and a black perspective, engaging the reader in the psychological truths of the characters' experiences while laying the past bare as a text for the present.

The broadcaster behind BBC Radio 3's "Jazz Line-Up" presents the first in a two-part musical odyssey culminating in the present day, with this first volume beginning in Tudor times and tracing how black music in Britain has responded to empire, colonialism and the new freedoms of post-war Britain.